Here is the second part to go along with my previous post! These are some of the plants that I photographed last year that I never got around to posting. I have posted the photos in chronological order from March through October.

Wow – it’s just over 4 hours until the end of 2016! And it’s been three months since I last posted anything! I don’t really do New Year’s Resolutions, but perhaps I should work on my post frequency in the new year =)

I didn’t spend nearly as much time taking photos outdoors this year as I have in past years. It was such a hot summer; I had had enough of the heat by mid-June! I was also busier this year than I have been in past years, which I can’t complain about. I photographed properties/buildings in five different states, including 20 properties in Texas in mid-November. I’ll be posting some of that work soon.

I go out into the garden with my camera whenever I can, usually on cloudy days or during the warm light of late afternoon and early evening, looking for anything and everything. Leaves, flowers, blades of grass, bugs, spider webs, frogs…anything that captures my attention. Cloudy days are great because the light is soft and there aren’t any harsh shadows and the light from the low sun late in the afternoon/early evening makes everything glow. I love being outside at that time of day…you can feel night coming on and the world winding down.

It’s been pretty hot here in the Atlanta area for the past two weeks. The day time highs have been getting up into the mid 90s and over night lows have been in the mid and upper 70s. Way too hot for me! I haven’t been doing outdoorsy stuff as much as usual – just walking to the mailbox can make you break into a sweat!

I have been tending to my cucumbers, though, and worrying that the heat might make them grow too quickly. But all has gone well and my first attempt at growing cucumbers has produced fruit! It’s been a lot of fun to watch the plants grow from a few inches tall to climbing up a trellis that is more than a foot-and-a-half taller than me. And the tendrils on a cucumber plant are amazing. If you’re patient you can actually watch them reach for the trellis or anything nearby that they can latch on to.

Below are a series of photographs from early May up until just a couple of days ago:

Before I share the photographs from my most recent house shoot I wanted to post some of what I’ve been photographing in the garden. Starting about an hour to an hour and a half before sunset the low angle of the sun filtering through the various types and colors of leaves is hard to resist. I’ve been doing most of this work hand-held because it’s so much easier to move from plant to plant and not have to constantly re-adjust my tripod. I like being able to move quickly as the light changes and lie down on the ground if I need to get a particular angle (kneeling bare-legged in fresh pine straw, however, has not been fun).

There are definite benefits with the tripod, though, and I did use it to get some of the shots below. I’m finding that the ball head on my tripod is not strong enough to hold the weight of my macro lens and it’s a lot of work to get the lens pointed exactly where I want it. After I book a few more real estate shoots I might be looking into acquiring a geared head for my tripod. They’re supposed to be good for real estate photography, too (getting the camera perfectly level and the sensor perfectly parallel to a particular plane can be really challenging). The more I read about geared heads the more it seems like a good idea to get one!

I’ve been getting more practice with my 105mm macro lens and the more I use it the more I love it. We’ve had a lot of gray, overcast days here in the Atlanta area recently. That’s not so great for people who want to get outside and enjoy the spring temperatures, but it’s great for macro photography! In the above collage you will see Solomon’s Seal (top left), Calibrachoa (small orange flowers) and Creeping Jenny (the lime green/yellow-ish plant next to the Calibrachoa), Asiatic Lily leaves (far right), Azalea flowers (pink), Lily of the Valley (small, white, bell-shaped flowers), and tulips. I grew tulips for the first time this spring and they did really well.

I photographed a new listing a couple of days ago, so more real estate photos coming soon. I’m also trying to figure out how to post video to a blog post and get the formatting to work the way that I want it to. I have some simple time lapses that I’d like to post, but they will have to wait until I get things figured out!

(I’m also working on changing the blog settings so the featured image above can be viewed larger in a lightbox. Right now the size that you see is as large as I can make it.)

Spring is finally here and I’ve been out in the garden quite a bit trying to document its arrival. The hyacinths have been and gone and the daffodils have already peaked, too. But the tulips just emerged in the past week and the dogwoods and azaleas will be opening up soon. The carpenter bees are zooming all over the place, too. I love that when the plants start to emerge in the spring I don’t have to go very to find photography subjects! In the above collage you’ll see a daffodil, daffodil stems, Nandina leaves, an iris, pink hyacinth petals and a holly fern getting ready to uncurl.

I discovered my love of gardening and plants a few years ago when I moved into a house for the first time. Plants are fascinating. And if you look hard enough even a garden that isn’t well-tended can provide never-ending photography opportunities (especially if you have a macro lens and can work really close to your subjects). Luckily my mom’s garden is very well taken care of and her recent acquisition of two elephant ears has provided me with some interesting new photography victims!

It’s early February and I can see spring coming around the corner. Some of my crocuses have already already flowered (the yellow ones – they’re always first), the daffodils are out, some tulips are already starting to pop through the ground and my hiacynth is almost done flowering. This is the first year that I’ve had an early-season hiacynth growing in the house and I really like it. It smells good =) I can’t wait to take my other bulbs back outside when it starts to warm up. Maybe with a little luck I’ll get my calla lilies to flower this year!

I’ve been growing green peppers since early in the summer but I think nature has decided for me that I’m done for the year. Over the past several months my pepper plant (while living in a large container on my driveway) has been visited by my friendly back yard deer a few times and had quite a few of its leaves nipped off. A few days ago I was getting into the car when I noticed that my pepper plant was…a bit sparse-looking. I immediately assumed that my deer had visited, but when I looked more closely I noticed that the leaves didn’t appear to have been nipped off. And then I saw the green guy above (pretty tight crop).

I put a succulent garden together for my sister-in-law a few weeks ago and I liked it so much that I put a small one together for myself. I found a container that I liked and squished three happy little succulents into it. And then took a bunch of pictures of it. My plants don’t know it but they’re some of the most photographed plants around.

I visited Gibbs Gardens up in Ball Ground, GA last week. The gardens have been under planning and development for about 30 years and just opened to the public this past March. Hands down my favorite part was the Japanese garden. I loved all of the little Buddha statues and pagodas. The purple irises really stood out against the various shades of green. When I got home and looked at the pictures that I had taken I realized just how carefully planned all of the textures, colors and sizes were. The attention to detail throughout the gardens is impressive, to say the least.